Fruit descriptors for Feijoa sellowiana

The introduction and evaluation garden of native fruit tree species, located at INIA Las Brujas, Uruguay, is the result of extensive efforts of prospecting and introducing germplasm for over 20 years. The garden comprised wild, native accessions from Uruguay, foreign cultivars as well as progenies derived from planned hybridizations. This study presents the phenotypic characterization of 329 feijoa genotypes that are part of this collection, based on 24 fruit descriptors (12 qualitative and 12 quantitative traits), evaluated over two growing seasons (2021-2022 and 2022-2023). The most frequently observed characteristics included trees of medium to low fruit load (up to 10 kg per plant), medium-sized fruits (30-50 g), flavor ranging from moderate to good, light green color, slightly rough skin texture, ellipsoid fruit shape, semi-open sepal position, rounded apex and base, translucent flesh, clearly defined locules, and undetectable flesh browning from one-minute assays. The wide distribution of states of expression for each trait, or the dispersion of values for the quantitative traits evaluated, indicated that the feijoa collection exhibited high variability in fruit-related traits, serving as essential raw material for improving fruit quality in feijoa.